All good info. unfortunately more times than not, I am doing some slight mastering... usually a normalize to bring the levels up to 98.5% (or to lower them and avoid the few clips I may have - and yes I know this doesn't repair the clipped audio, but it brings the clip down below clipping on playback).
So assuming I do perform a normalize, I would want to dither down to 24bit. Not sure that this means anything, but the raw audio is being recorded in a float format, it's not that it's being converted to float just inside the DAW.
Honestly I would just convert to wavpack and share those files (similar compression ratio to flac, yet supports 32bit float), but this is not a standard sharing format, and can't be uploaded to archive or etree.
Now for mbit+. Right now I'm in no type of financial situation to be buying new software, so what's the best free/already owned option out there. Other than Audition I have Audiodesk (stripped down version of Digital Performer) and Soundtrack Pro (along with the whole FCP suite). Of course I have Audacity too, but I can't imagine that being better than Audition. I also notice that quicktime and toast can convert formats, but I'm pretty sure they just truncate.
oh yeah... if you haven't realized it yet, I'm on a mac